Rather it is shaped by what surrounds me, people, time, place in which I live, each in it’s way burrows into my being to mould what is seen as me. As an artist I strive to reach beyond the person formed by those external influences to discover an identity which is me shorn of social messages and interpretation. I am looking for freedom.

To do this I must examine how I act in response to what is expected of me. I must analyse and understand how I respond to the rules of my society. Then I abandon those rules to find my freedom by accepting whatever happens as a matter of choice. My choice.

As Slavov Žižek states: “The highest act of freedom is to accept as your free decision what will happen.”

To capture this freedom in my art means it must move beyond the basic rules of my society. It must provide an environment free of social context and external influences. An environment that offers space to experience a self removed from the need to respond to the pressures of the outside world. I create these environments by covering a blank piece of paper in pencil marks. These marks are then erased before applying another layer of marks over the palimpsest of the first. This continues until I have created a paper whose marks have no definable relationship with position or time. This is the base on which I draw my figures. In each case I am striving to portray the image of the sitter within a neutral space free of external influences. Using colour pencils I insure the individual is recognisable but nothing more as my objective is to still the viewers need for information and encourage them to see only what is there in all its frailty and transience.